How to Compress F5 BIG-IP log files

Compress F5 BIG-IP log files

When you open a support case with F5 Support they will ask for a qkview and quite likely they will ask for logs from the system. The reason for this is because although the qkview utility will collect the logs from the device, by default it gathers up to 5MB of log files, meaning that the files can get truncated.

In order to gather all the log files from the system and not miss anything, you need to create a tarball file following these steps:

1. Log in to the command line.
2. Create a tar archive in the /var/tmp directory that contains all the files in the /var/log directory, by typing the following command: tar zcvf /var/tmp/$HOSTNAME-logs.tar.gz /var/log/*
3. This will generate a file in /var/tmp with the name of the device followed by the -logs.tar.gz suffix. You need to transfer this file out of the system using an utility like scp/WinSCP

That is all in regards to creating a tar file with the logs that you can submit to F5 Support. However, if you want to dig further, you can find below some of the logs in the /var/log directory and their description:

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This article first appeared on the AUSTRAL TECH blog at https://www.australtech.net/blog/.